- For one week (seven days), keep a food journal. Record everything you eat and what time you eat it. Remember to include things like candy, pop, beer, vitamin pills, etc., too. For packaged foods, you will probably want to keep the dietary
information from the labels for future reference (see below). Non-nutritive things like aspirin and prescription drugs need not be included. Also record general comments on how you feel (headache?, groggy?, lots of energy?) and any other insights
you may have in terms of how what you are eating is affecting your body, your health (how you “feel”), and/or your mood. (8 pt.)
- List all foods eaten during that week and total the number of servings for each (for example: 14 C milk, 7 oranges, 21 cans of soft drink, etc. – remember that 14 C of milk have 14 times the nutrients in 1 C of milk).
To make it easier to keep track of things, sort/group the foods by food group categories (put all the dairy food together, etc.). (8 pt.)
- Using one or more of the resources listed below (use of the NAT Web site is suggested) or others of which you are aware,
determine the actual total amounts (grams, milligrams, IU, etc., NOT PERCENT DV because %DV only applies to people in a certain age/height/weigh/sex category and not everyone) of the various nutrients in the foods you ate
(remember to correctly account for the number of servings) during that week. The NAT Web site includes
Calories,
total carbohydrates,
fiber,
total fat,
unsaturated fatty acids,
monounsaturated fatty acids,
polyunsaturated fatty acids,
cholesterol
protein,
vitamin A (retinol),
vitamin B1 (thiamine),
vitamin B2 (riboflavin),
vitamin B3 (niacin),
vitamin C,
sodium (Na),
potassium (K),
calcium (Ca),
phosphorus (P),
and iron (Fe),
so at a minimum, you should include those for an “adequate” completion of this portion of the assignment.
Hints on using NAT
If you are using the NAT Web page listed below (recommended so you don’t have to do all the calculations by hand),
- After you get all your foods entered, click “analyze foods”.
- Then, click on “display all nutrients” (It’ll pop up a message about the database being 95% complete, or something – just click “OK”).
- Note, if you don’t have time to finish and need to add more, later, they have an option to save a work in progress so you can return later – follow their instructions.
- When you get your analysis, notice there are three columns of numbers: “Total” = what was actually in the food you ate, “Rec” = the government’s recommended amount for one day, and “%Rec” = what percent of that recommended amount you got.
Notice in that last column, black = higher than 100%, yellow = marginally lower, and red = too low.
However, keep in mind that if you are working with a week’s-worth of food at once, you’ll need to think in terms of 700% of the recommended amount, not 100%.
- NAT won’t do the daily averages for you. You will need to either print out your results, then use a calculator to determine the daily averages, or save a copy of the Web page with your results to your hard drive so you can open it in your spreadsheet software and calculate the averages that way.
However, there are several, very important nutrients not included in NAT, so if you are willing to take
the time to find as many of these as you can from other sources, doing so can help both your grade and your understanding
of what’s in the foods you eat. See if you can find values for
sugar,
vitamin D (calciferol),
vitamin E (d-a-tocopherol),
vitamin B6 (pyridoxine),
vitamin B12 (cobalamine),
folacin (folic acid),
magnesium (Mg),
zinc (Zn),
and iodine (I).
Also, just because so many people consume so much
caffeine,
and aspartame,
you may wish to see if you can find data on those (for example, some people might be shocked to realize the amount of caffeine they are consuming).
Once you get the total for each nutrient, divide each of those numbers by seven to figure your average daily intake. As noted above,
if you are using NAT, you will either need to print out your results and use a calculator to figure out the daily averages, or else save
a copy of the Web page to your hard drive, then open that in your spreadsheet software and add another column to calculate the averages.
If you have a label from a packaged food item that lists “% Daily Value,” you will have to look up the actual RDA values (required in the next step, anyway) and do a bit of math.
For example, if a food reports that it has 47% DV for vitamin C, you would need to know that the “generic” RDA for vitamin C is 60 mg, then multiply 0.47 (= 47%, remember?) × 60 mg = 28.2 mg of vitamin C in one serving of that food. (12 pt.)
- Determine what the ideal daily amounts of each of these nutrients are for a person of your sex, age, weight, and height (pregnant? nursing?).
For this, it is preferable to use the most recent sources because the Recommended Daily Allowances
(RDA) are periodically revised.
Note that if you used the NAT Web page to complete the previous step, you probably already have most of the information you need for this step!
Spend some time researching and thinking about what’s best for you, because, for example, the U.S. government’s RDA for vitamin C is only 60 mg, yet many
nutritionists claim that we should be getting at least 1 g, maybe even 3 to 4 g per day. In a lab experiment that our Biology 112 students do, each person is asked to consume 2 g (2000 mg) of
vitamin C, then measure how much of that is excreted during the next 8 hr (vitamin C is not stored, so it’s “use it or lose it”), and most healthy people only excrete about 500 mg, suggesting that they retain and
use around 1500 mg, far above the government’s RDA of 60 mg.
Compare your average daily intake to these values and determine where you are low (not enough zinc?), high (too much sodium?), or OK.
You will also need to research and think about which highs/lows are OK and which are not. For example, high sodium is probably not OK, while high vitamin C probably is OK, and while low fat might be OK for some people, low thiamine probably isn’t.
However, to use vitamin C as an example, again, while the RDA is only 60 mg and some nutritionists recommend as much as 1 to 3 or 4 g, ingestion as much as 5 to 10 g by a healthy person might cause diarrhea, the first sign of a vitamin C “overdose”,
so you do also need to be aware of those limits. (12 pt.)
At this point, assuming you are a registered student and want credit for this assignment, you need to submit your work for this much of the project.
- Now, using the same resources as before, plan a week of meals that will give you 100% of all of the above nutrients – a balanced diet (and yes, that means you do have to do the calculations).
To pick on vitamin C as an example, again, if the RDA is 60 mg, then that’s 100% of what you need. Thus, if you eat an orange that contains only 40 mg of vitamin C, that’s only 67% of what you need.
Start from what you normally eat and substitute more nutritious foods you’re willing to eat for less nutritious ones. Keep in
mind ease of preparation and your own likes and dislikes – be reasonable in your expectations. Include at least one new food item or recipe you’ve never tried before, but are willing to eat. Again, using one of the Web-based diet analysis programs, such as NAT, can help you do this
much more quickly. If, for example, you use NAT, you can plug in each day of your proposed new diet to see where you are high or low, nutritionally. NAT has features that will allow you to add or delete various food items or change the amount of something, and as I recall, even has a feature to “suggest foods” that are good sources of
nutrients of which you might need more, so you can “tweak” your new diet until it’s just right. Whatever you turn in should demonstrate that you have checked to see that this new diet supplies the full RDA for
each nutrient. At this point, assuming you are a registered student, you should submit your work for this step of the project. (16 pt.)
- Go on this new diet for one week. Keep a food journal as before, again noting what and when you eat as well as general comments
on how you feel. (10 pt.)
- Go back through all your notes. Given that one week is not really a long enough time for a change in diet to have any great effects, did you find any noticeable changes in how you felt from the old diet to the new?
As you review your diet journals, for your own benefit, you may also wish to look for correlations between certain foods and the way you felt after eating them:
for example, if every time you ate eggs, you got a headache six hours later, that could
indicate an allergy. (6 pt.)
- Once again, if you are a
registered student, you need to submit your work
for this portion of the project. Along with submission of this part of
the assignment, you will be asked several short-answer “essay”-type questions
about the various nutrients you have been studying. These questions will be
picked at random from a larger list, and thus, will be different each time
the data submission Web page is loaded.
Thus, before you submit this part of your data, make sure you are familiar
with not only the RDAs for the various nutrients, but also be able to give
examples of foods are good sources of those nutrients, and know why you need
those nutrients (What do they do in your body? How do they help you?). Also,
be familiar with “special” nutritional needs of certain groups of people
(women, men, pregnant, elderly, etc.) Are there any special factors/conditions
that should be considered, such as the effects of cooking or storing food,
the type of cookware used, consumption of antibiotics or antacids that could
make a difference in the nutritional content or the availability of the nutrients
in your food? Is it possible to overdose on any of these nutrients, and if so,
what are the signs/symptoms of an overdose? Have you discovered any interesting
stories about any of the nutrients such as how/when they were discovered or
that they contain “unusual” chemicals, etc? What diseases are caused by deficiencies
of the various nutrients, and what are the signs and symptoms of those diseases?
(28 pt.)
|
ell now,
after all that volleyball, our players were getting pretty hungry, so they
decided to stop for lunch. Everyone brought along a lot of good food to
share, so all-in-all, there was a variety of healthy foods from which to
choose, including vegetables, salads, and casseroles, with meat and veggie
burgers on the grill, but of course, one thing that was very popular was the
chocolate cake. Did you know that chocolate cake is “biological”? Let’s look
first at the ingredients, and then, the cake’s nutritional value.
